Round -up of columns: Why it is good to age and read papers

Why it is good to age and read papers

Will you live to collect your pension? Under proposals drawn up by a Tory think-tank, maybe not. Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has suggested a new age limit for OAPs: 75. Which is not much help for Glaswegian men, who, on average, can expect to see just 73. The idea has sparked plenty of debate among columnists, not least those not in the first flush of youth.

The National

Veteran Scottish journalist Ruth Wishart was distinctly unimpressed, stressing how different people enjoy very different health outcomes as they age. And Ms Wishart was not buying the notion that fellow oldies were being freed from the tyranny of a state pension when they can still work.

“What matters, self evidently, is what you have been doing with your employment life,” she wrote. “Someone working on building sites for decades is likely to have more health issues than someone tapping laptops over the same period.

“So here is a public health warning: If a Conservative government, or its offshoot workers labouring in think tankery, come up with something they say is born solely out of concern for your wellbeing, check the label.

You’ll find it says snake oil.”

The Guardian

Getting old is not all bad. At least that is the take of Suzanne Moore. She was referring to new research that suggests life is “awful” for over-50s. No so, Ms Moore, responds. Clocking up the years is also liberating.

“No one talks about the good bits of ageing, so I will,” she said. “The menopause. A time of anxiety and then freedom, when women move from being someone who can reproduce to someone who can’t. Everything changes physically and mentally.

“It is a premonition of death and one becomes a different kind of being altogether: a creature who can only reproduce itself.

“Ageing is also a process of editing. You know those people you didn’t like much? Well, don’t bother with them. If someone has said “we must do lunch” for 20 years and you haven’t, you are not going to now, just as you are not going to wear that little black dress you were wearing when you got off with X.”

“Getting old means relief at being cancelled – not in the social media sense, but in the “let’s not bother meeting for lunch” sense. It means loving new things and discarding old things. It means living as you want to live, not as you should.”

An SNP minister, Humza Yousaf, recently admitted he is uncomfortable with some of the connotations of the word ‘nationalist’, re-igniting the perennial debate about whether nationalism can ever really be nice and civic as pitched by Scottish Yessers.

The Times

Writer Alex Massie has explored these issues for years and acknowleged the SNP has moved well away from its cruder nationalist messages of the 1990s. He cites a “familiar refrain”, that “our nationalism cannot possibly be compared to other, more virulent and xenophobic nationalisms”, especially Brexitism.

Mr Massie concedes this argument has some merit and describes the SNP as the “dullest nationalist party in Europe”. He added: “But that is the party at its best, and it is reasonable to note that not every SNP supporter or politician shows the party at its best.

The future of the media - and the safety of journalists - has been a hot topic since Guardian columnist Owen Jones was attacked. His fellow opinion writers have been thinking out loud about their own role in society.

The Press and Journal

The paper’s Lindsay Razaq said she is “not pining for a bygone golden era that isn’t coming back”. But Ms Razaq still sees real journalism as an antidote to the scourge of fake news. As Instagram develops automated artificial intelligence systems for reporting inaccuracies on social media, she stressed that fixing mistakes was not enough. “I’ll admit to twice messing up royally during 10 years in the trade,” she wrote.

“After all journalists are human, not robots - for the moment anyway. But while we are not perfect, it’s worth remembering that without us, without a free press, our democracy would be weaker and we’d be worse off.”

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